Does your blog suffer from slow load times? I know a lot of people websites that take forever to load, and it turns people away. Some of you may notice coming on to the blog today that it is loading more quickly than it might have for you before now.

The reason for this improvement is a handy little plugin called WP Supercache. I have known about this plugin for a while but never actually installed and ran it before last night. I just didn’t think I needed it. Yesterday I was talking to my buddy John and he brought it up.

With a bit of coaxing he got me to install the plugin, and what do you know, it works like a charm. What it does is cuts down all your php into html form. As a result the page loads faster, gives less of a load on your shared server, and helps your blog withstand being bogged down by high traffic volume.

Oh and if you don’t believe me, we tested it on John Chow dot com (which is obviously a higher server load blog) as well and it definitely sped the blog up a bit as well. If that isn’t proof that the plugin really works, I don’t know what is!

Here is a link to download the plugin if you guys want to get it for yourself.

Why Should You Care About Load Time?

I know some of you are probably thinking, “my blog loads fine for me, why should I care about my load time, it seems fine to me”. The fact is, people have different connection speeds. As a result what loads quickly for you might be slow for someone on a lower connection. These people may be turned away from your site due to high load time and as a result you’re loosing potential visitors.

Also, if you get a mass of visitors (from a source such as social media), your server may be bogged down due the load the visitors put on it, making your blog slower for everyone.

As a result, you should try and optimize load time as best you can. A good benchmarking tool I use just to see changes in load time is the website optimizer tool. While I haven’t found it’s load times to be 100% accurate, it helps you to benchmark one load time versus another to see what makes your website load the fastest. It also gives you a range of load times based on different connection speeds.

If you haven’t got to optimizing your websites load time at all, perhaps it’s time you started!